Kitching’s death opens Labor wounds that only the party can heal

At the end of a bleak fortnight for many party members, messages from federal Labor’s leadership are opening old wounds. Throughout the weeks’ news cycles, senior leaders have ferociously dismissed allegations that a climate of workplace toxicity, bullying, and extreme stress surrounded the final years of Senator Kimberley Kitching’s life.

The issue is beyond coronial-style causality between Kitching’s early death and the political environment around her. It is a matter of principle and an inescapable leadership question for Anthony Albanese who, after all, fired the first shots on this theme at the Morrison government.

The late Labor senator Kimberley Kitching.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

When former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins came forward last year with her rape allegations, federal Labor made a deliberate decision to make women’s safety and intra-partisan culture a political issue. Labor assumed the risk this entailed, knowing full well the perils of perceived hypocrisy. Consistently, and relatively successfully, Labor has argued that progressive values and gender-parity policies place them breezily ahead of the Liberals.

But the argument has reached an inflection point: as Labor faces serious allegations going to the heart of safety and respect between its senior colleagues, the leadership’s blunt denials and obfuscations are as dangerous as they are disingenuous.

The curious logic appears to be that progressives are somehow immune from the acts of everyday brutality that political contest invariably creates. The persistence of this narrative is irresponsible and dishonest.

My experiences with the wrinkles in Labor’s operating dynamics occurred in full public view. Last year, buoyed by the calls of ALP women for a flood of new, young representatives to enter Parliament, I mounted a challenge to the factionally preferred candidate in South Australia’s safest federal seat. At the beginning of a process that deteriorated rapidly into an unsafe environment, I documented concerns about being unfairly frozen out of the nomination process, and transmitted them to senior party leaders in the state. In a swiftly organised meeting, one office holder aggressively instructed me to “never write things down again”.

Mere weeks later I endured attempted character assassinations, malicious backgrounding to journalists, and surveillance of my movements that made me fear for my physical safety.

Alice Dawkins says she confronted a toxic response when she attempted to contest a Labor seat.

It is never a good time to ventilate examples of poor behaviour, and critiques from within are fatally positioned as emotive acts of retribution rather than valuable anecdotal evidence for an organisation that must transform to meet its own standards. Dismissing stories at the outset, or spinning them as exceptional incidents, may extinguish spot fires, yet it leaves behind a stubborn and acrid smoulder.

The Jenkins report, among others, indicates that parliamentary workplace safety is a bipartisan problem. There are enough credible and senior Labor voices on the public record verifying this. The only option for a party born of the labour movement is to comprehensively address its hazards internally, as well as across the aisle.

This would begin by embracing complaints whenever they transpired, and having the humility to accept that noble values alone are insufficient protection mechanisms. The longer federal Labor holds the line that there is nothing to see in its hallowed halls, the longer its workers wait for the basic accountability they so masterfully advocate for in every other professional domain of Australian life.

You cannot, in good faith, stand for protecting workers while you simultaneously accept a culture in which poll metrics matter more than the maintenance of a safe work environment. Ensuring safety and accountability for party employees, members and volunteers is not a luxury enjoyed when the spotlight is elsewhere and the election is in the distant past. It is a daily practice of institutional courage and a willingness to facilitate uncomfortable and occasionally public conversations. It is a perilous pursuit, but a path that Labor itself started and now must finish.

The human element here – the undeniable population of Labor workers and volunteers who face intimidation, bullying and intra-partisan hostility, just as much as their Liberal opponents – is too easily forgotten. The harm for Labor is not merely a momentary dip in the polls, but the sustained denial of recognition, protection and justice for its diligent workers and volunteers.

As members on the left bristle with frustration that they are losing points in what should be an unlosable debate over which party treats its people better, one point remains. Labor is held to higher standards because the party represents higher standards. These standards have generated world-leading public policy for many years. They inspire generations of advocates and public interest defenders to join Labor’s ranks. The party’s current custodians, so close to a governing position, must reckon with its incongruities lest they fall from a great height.

Alice Dawkins ran in the preselection contest for the safe ALP federal seat of Spence in July last year.